THERE WAS ONE GUY WE KNEW TO CALL IN L.A., THIS GUY JEFF LESTER, who was playing a deputy in a TV series based on the movie Walking Tall. Tom was a substitute teacher back in Arkansas and had taught with Jeff’s girlfriend’s mother. (The girlfriend had a part in the TV series too.)
Jeff was real nice to us. Tom and I told him we had written a screenplay that wasn’t worth a shit—I mean, the writing was pretty good, but it was like 190 pages long and structured totally wrong. We didn’t know what we were doing, but Jeff said, “Why don’t you just come to this acting class and check it out?” And I said, “How much does it cost? I don’t have any money.” And he said, “You can just audit the class.”
I didn’t know shit about any of what was going on in that class. There was one chick in there that I had seen on a commercial, so, to me, she was like fucking Laurence Olivier. This acting class was taught by a guy named John Widlock, who I thank every day of my life. I can trace everything I’m doing now, any success I’ve ever had, to that acting class at Crossroads of the World, Maudie Treadway, and Billy Wilder, who I’ll get to later, because of one simple thing: encouragement.
I didn’t start out to be an actor. I was in a rock-and-roll band, and I played baseball. But to this day—and I’ve had different acting coaches and teachers over the years—I’ve never seen an acting teacher or an acting class make a bad actor good. I have, however, seen acting teachers make a good actor worse. A lot of acting teachers take you from point A to point Z by going through point Q, as opposed to going straight for point Z. What I mean by that is—and if you live in L.A., you understand—if I’m living here in Beverly Hills and I want to get to Glendale, I don’t go through Downey to get to Glendale, I go straight to Glendale.
The point of acting, if you’re looking to do good acting, is to be realistic, to make it look natural. If you’re studying to be natural, you’ve already fucked up. It’s like somebody’s telling you to take a creative writing course. How do you teach someone to be a creative writer? It’s not possible. It’s like the old joke about military intelligence. So if an acting teacher says, “I’m going to teach you how to be natural,” then you’re screwed.
I speak at different acting groups sometimes, and acting teachers love it when the first thing I tell the students is, “Ignore as much of this shit as you can.” Either you’re an actor or you’re not an actor, and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it. Brando was great just by being Brando. If he was a dishwasher and he came out to bus your table, you’d watch him all the way back to the kitchen and be like, “What was that?”
In terms of acting process, you have a lot of really respected acting coaches and teachers, like the late Lee Strasberg, who really know their shit. They have some good ideas. But I think the way that acting classes can be best put to use is thinking of them as a place to work out. It’s like if you’re a musician and you’ve got nowhere to play, but somebody’s willing to let you come to their little workshop singing group every other week and play your songs. Now you have a place to work out and do your shit. Maybe you won’t get better at it, but you’ll get more comfortable. Acting classes are invaluable in that sense.
So I go into Widlock’s class the first time, and I sit in the back of the class, like I used to do in Maudie Treadway’s acting class when I was sixteen. But now I’m actually watching all these actors going up there and doing scenes and monologues. The class is interesting enough that I come in a second time to watch for free, and this time, after class, I go up to Widlock to talk with him.
“Look,” he says to me, “here’s what you gotta do if you really want to join the class: either prepare a monologue or get someone from the class or whatever to prepare a scene with you and come back next week to do it. We’ll see from there.”
I knew I was being auditioned to see if he thought I was worthy of being in his class. It was like forty or fifty bucks a class, which to me was like $1.2 million, but I go back to my cousin’s place in San Bernardino, and I tell Tom, “Yeah, they told me I gotta prepare a scene or a monologue, I don’t know …”
Tom had all these Shakespeare books lying around. So I flip through Othello and suddenly think, Oh, I know what I’ll do!
I always wrote short stories, and in high school acting class I would do lots of characters, so I made a plan to rewrite Shakespeare using regular language. And I’d play every character.
Othello’s a good story, I think. I know situations like that. I’ll do that one. So I start writing it down, but get lazy about twenty pages in and think, Oh fuck it, I can make the rest of it up, I know this story.
So I go back Wednesday night to the Crossroads of the World. John, as always, is sitting up on this little platform on the stage, and he goes, “Billy, you got something?” I say, “Yeah, I got something, it’s a monologue or whatever.” When it’s my turn, I go up on the stage thinking I could do whatever the fuck I wanted because that’s what he told me. “Whatever you want to do,” he said, so that’s what I did. I rewrote Othello. The play was now called Othie and Desi, after the main characters, Othello and Desdemona, and I did it from the point of view of Iago, the bad guy, from his jail cell after everything had gone down. I called him “I-A-Go the Redneck.”
So I start by saying, “Look, my name’s I-A-Go. I got in a lot of shit here a while back, and this is how it played out. There was a black dude named Othie, right? …” And that’s the way I did it. I played Desi as this rich chick—her dad was this rich dude, you know, Romeo and Juliet–ish—and Cassio as this real foppish kind of gay dude. At the end, I-A-Go goes, “What the hell hath thou wrought upon this girl?” or something like that, and of course Othie turns around and says, “Hey, man, I killed a bitch, can’t you see that?” I did all the different voices too.
John stops me after I had been going for about forty minutes. Everybody had just been sitting completely still during the performance, but after John stops me, they all start applauding like crazy. Shit, I killed these motherfuckers, didn’t I? I think to myself. Then John jumps up on his perch and goes, “Wow, okay, first of all, right off the bat, I have to tell you when you do a scene or a monologue, it needs to be three to five minutes.” And I go, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that.” Then he goes, “Second of all, I’m sorry I stopped you. How much more of this is there?” I tell him, and he goes, “Come back and finish this next week if you can squeeze it down a little. But from now on, three to five minutes.”
Then he goes, “How did you feel?” which acting teachers ask, but I didn’t know acting-teacher-speak yet, so I say, “I feel all right. I could use a cheeseburger, but other than that I’m all right, you know?” And he goes, “Did you feel you accomplished what you wanted to accomplish?” And I go, “Not yet, there’s a lot of this shit left, I mean, like you said, I’m going to come back next week.” And he says, “No, I mean, what you did here, do you feel like you accomplished something?” And I say, “Yeah, absolutely. I was just telling you a story, you know?” And he goes, “Amazing, amazing. Okay. We’ll talk later. We gotta get on to some other people.” So somebody else comes up, and they do their thing from Forty Bales of Cotton or whatever the hell it was.
After class Widlock comes up to me and says, “I didn’t want to say this in front of everybody, but I’ve never had anybody in my class that does this kind of thing.” I’m thinking back to Maudie Treadway when he adds, “I’ve had a lot of good actors in my class, but you’ve got some kind of thing here, you’re very different. I think you should probably always stick to what you did tonight, which was original, something of your own invention. And I have a feeling that you need to write your own stuff, that you need to come up with your own characters. I don’t think you’re the kind of guy that needs to stand in the cattle call. You’re going to make your career as a true original.”
The class after he said all that stuff to me, I say, “John, I’d love to be in this class, but I don’t have any money. I’m completely broke and rooming with my cousin in San Bernardino.” He goes, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll either pay me back or you won’t, but I think this is going to be worth it for me.”
After that, I would take Tom’s car every Wednesday into L.A., into Hollywood, to the Crossroads of the World on Cherokee and Sunset. John Widlock became like my keeper. In Hollywood, sometimes acting teachers become your protector and your psychologist.
John had this house over on Bronson Avenue up by the Hills that was pretty modest—a nice house, probably five or six rooms—but to me, his house was a mansion. He taught in San Francisco and L.A., so he’d go away for periods of time and would have me house-sit, which for me was this amazing luxury. He had cable television, and I watched Z Channel and I couldn’t believe it. During that time of watching Z Channel, I got into watching foreign films and all these things that I’d never really watched before. There was all this great shit that would eventually come out of that. Today Widlock’s a cattle rancher in Australia.